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Griego: Real people occupy ranks of Occupy Denver

By Tina GriegoDenver Post Columnist

Posted:
11/20/2011 01:00:00 AM MST

Paulette Shalhoub of Denver joins Occupy Denver protesters Saturday outside the Federal Reserve building downtown. "I'm more concerned about my country than I ever have been. This is my first march, but I'll be here every week," she said.
(Craig F. Walker, The Denver Post )

Among the people who joined the Occupy Denver march on Saturday were an information-technology consultant; a university student studying public health; a hospital outreach worker; a retired geriatric social worker; a physical therapist; and a restaurant manager, his wife who works in the home — and their 5-year-old son, who may not yet understand what democracy means, but is learning, as the chant goes, what it looks like.

Maggie Lamitie, 84, showed up as she does most Saturdays. During the civil-rights movement in her New York state suburb, she tried to persuade her community to allow black children to attend the local elementary school and so fill otherwise empty seats. She was rewarded for this with telephone threats.

It is as it was. Those who benefit from the status quo have never easily accepted its change.

Maggie was joined by her friends, Elfie Rosen, now retired, and Helen, who would rather not give her last name.

"I believe the people, American people, have had the wool pulled over their eyes for a very long time," Helen says. "We need to make politicians understand they report to us, not the corporations."

The women are not, by the way, wearing bandannas over their faces. I do not spy a Guy Fawkes mask among them. They are wearing tennis shoes and blue jeans and look like the grandmothers they are.

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It's easy to dismiss a movement when its public face is that of those for whom sympathy runs thin to begin with: the homeless, the anarchists, the thugs, the dopers, the cranks. It is, of course, good strategy for the powers-that-be to ensure that this remains the public face. Even the sympathetic are alienated.

But the more representative face can be found on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon when the ranks of Occupy Denver fill with those who work or go to school or are out looking for jobs during the week. They come early. They march through downtown. They engage in passionate discussions about income inequality and undue corporate influence and the starving of public education and the need for affordable, quality health care. Then they go home, to their families, to their jobs.

Yesterday's was the eighth consecutive Saturday march. The crowd of several hundred was smaller than usual. Arnie Carter was waiting for me. He's a member of The Romero Theater Troupe, which is where I first met him. Arnie has joined in nearly all the Saturday marches.

"I'm a husband. I'm a father. I work at Denver Health as an outreach worker," he says.

"One reason I come is because what's happening in our economy hit home for me. My wife lost her job. We're struggling to stay in our home. But also because in my job, I see how the poor have less and less power and the middle class is getting pushed down."

I meet Colleen Bryan, who worked 30 years as a manager for the state. Walk though here and what you will find are people asking hard questions, she tells me. "How do we make our government work for us? How do we reclaim it from corporate influence? How do we make a future for ourselves?"

She joined the civil-rights and feminist movements, she says. "And I feel really stupid standing out here as an old lady. I have arthritis and I can't do much, but sometimes everybody needs to be out. We know we have to come together before we can break something that seems so intractable."

Several of my conversations remind me of something my friend Eddie once said. He's a working-class guy, retired now. He told me he sensed something just outside his field of vision and it had to do with the poor being pitted against the poor and the system being rigged so that no matter how hard he worked, he was forever an outsider looking in.

This is the sense I get from many people here. Some see the problem clearly and call for campaign finance reform, for universal health care, for a tax code that eliminates corporate loopholes and deductions. I talk to no one who begrudges the wealthy man or woman his or her rewards if gained fairly. But I talked to many who believe that all should have an equal opportunity to seek the same rewards and that corporate influence on Congress, growing economic disparity, and continuing education inequality threaten opportunity's very underpinnings.

It's hard to define the public face of a movement, but if I had to base it on what I saw Saturday afternoon, I would say it is that of the parent and grandparent who grew up believing in and benefiting from the American Dream and who is now frightened that it will be denied to their children. For that reason, above all others, they march.

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